pdfresurrect
------------
PDFResurrect is a tool aimed at analyzing PDF documents.  The PDF format allows
for previous document changes to be retained in a more recent version of the
document, thereby creating a running history of changes for the document.  This
tool attempts to extract all previous versions while also producing a summary
of changes between versions.  This tool can also "scrub" or write data over the
original instances of PDF objects that have been modified or deleted, in an
effort to disguise information from previous versions that might not be
intended for anyone else to read.


Notes
-----
The scrubbing feature (-s) should not be trusted for any serious security
uses.  After using this feature, please verify that it in fact zero'd all
of the objects that were of concern (those objects that were to be zero'd).

This tool relies on the application reading the pdfresurrect extracted versions
to treat the last xref table as the most recent in the document.  This should
typically be the case.

The verbose output, which tries to deduce the PDF object type (e.g. stream,
page), is not always accurate, and the object counts might not be 100%
accurate.  However, this should not prevent the extraction of the versions.
This output is merely to provide a hint for the user as to what might be
different between the documents.

Object counts might appear off in linearized PDF documents.  That is not truly
the case, the reason for this is that each version of the PDF consists of the
objects that compose the linear portion of the PDF plus all of the objects that
compose the version in question.  Suppose there is a linearized PDF with 59
objects in its linear portion, and suppose the PDF has a second version that
consists of 21 objects.  The total number of objects in "version 2"
would be 59 + 21 or 80 objects.


Building
--------
From the top-level directory of pdfresurrect run:
    ./configure
    make

To install/uninstall the resulting binary to a specific path
the '--prefix=' flag can be used:
    ./configure --prefix=/my/desired/path/

Debugging mode can be enabled when configuring by using the following option:
    ./configure --enable-debug

The resulting binary can be placed anywhere, however it can also be
installed/uninstalled to the configured path automatically.  If no path was
specified at configure time, the default is /usr/local/bin
To install/uninstall:
    make install 
         or
    make uninstall


Thanks
------
The rest of 757labs (www.757labs.org)
GNU (www.gnu.org)
Francois Marier of Debian


Contact / Project URL
---------------------
mattdavis9@gmail.com
www.757labs.org/wiki/Projects/pdfresurrect
